Information on the Internet and World Wide Web is available in various forms, formats, types, and amounts. The Internet has been a valuable medium for enabling the proliferation of information. However, locating copies of information or data is a difficult task using various types of conventional techniques.
Some conventional techniques rely upon the use of locating or identifying keywords or text associated with a given image, document, photo, picture, song, or other digital data file (“file”). Keywords or text (e.g., metadata) may be associated with a given file to enable search engines, crawlers, bots, and other search applications to find files based on the keywords or data. However, keywords or text do not necessarily indicate the actual content of a given file. For example, a keyword “tree” may be assigned and used to identify the picture of a river. As another example, metadata using keywords describing a public personality may be used to describe a web page associated with a completely different personality. In other words, conventional techniques that use keywords and metadata to locate files are typically inaccurate and inefficient.
Other conventional solutions may rely upon the use of identifying objects within certain types of files. However, object data within a file may be obscured or modified such that conventional techniques are unable to locate and identify copies of a given file that may be slightly different from each other because of artifacts that are located within the image, video, audio, or other data.
Thus, what is needed is a solution for identifying data without the limitations of conventional techniques.